Guru3D made an interesting find at Lian-Li's Computex booth this year where they managed to take photos of a new all in one (AIO) liquid cooler that sports an all copper loop. Specifically, the company was showing off a new Lian-Li branded liquid cooler from Cinsys with a 240mm radiator. The "X-R240 Expandable water cooling heat radiating system" features a raw copper radiator surrounded by a metal shroud (reportedly aluminum) that houses 120mm fan mounts and a pump, large removable tubing, and a thin nickel plated copper CPU water block.

Looking at the photos from Guru3D, the Lian-Li X-R240 AIO certainly looks classy and should perform fairly well with the copper block and copper radiator (which is nice to see in an AIO where aluminum is common). The large tubing appears to be fairly long enabling the radiator to be placed up to or in the front of a mid-tower case, though I am curious how flexible it will be in a smaller case in tight quarters (if I am remembering my watercooling correctly, the larger diameter should mean it will be less likely to kink though). Further, it looks like the tubing is removable and users will be able to expand the loop to add additional blocks and/or radiators which is nice though you should be careful to avoid adding non-copper (aluminum/silver/ect) components to the Lian-Li loop. Angled and/or swivel barbs on the CPU blocks would have been nice as well since the straight barbs on the thin CPU block could make installation more difficult.

The raw copper is a nice aesthetic touch, though once it is installed in your case and sitting behind fans it is going to be hard to see and Guru3D does note that over time the copper will oxidize and discolor. Still, it might be useful for modders to get that steam punk look and feel. Thankfully it looks like there is plastic (and maybe foam) separating the copper radiator from the aluminum shell/shroud though it's less of an issue since the outside of the radiator isn't going to be submerged in water (hopefully!).

The company will reportedly be releasing other models beyond the 240mm shown at Computex presumably by the same OEM (Cinsys). A 360mm radiator and some GPU blocks would be nice to see! Hopefully Morry or Sebastian can get one in for testing soon!

What are your thoughts on Lian-Li using raw copper? Do you prefer plated copper?

If it has copper fins or aluminium it really doesn't matter much. Its how restrictive rad is. It can weight 10 kg for 240mm, but if it can't transfer heat efficiently all copper in the world won't help.

Take old airplex rads. Extremely expensive, load of copper, but not very efficient at heat transfer because of internal resistance.

I'm glad that G3D pointed out that copper will oxidize and discolor in time.

Those type of cooler will be valuable when overclocking x299 / x399 (combined with >8 core) cpus
But interestingly the copper core cooler that come "free" with the 8 core 1700 is near silent and allow decent overclocking.

Now, on x299 and x399 my main concern would not be CPU cooling but power delivery. Overclocking a 16 core or 18 core will most likely draw ~300w and this will need active cooling (like on high end GPU)

I guess this is why we see x299 motherboard with fan on the "vrm" block.

Also using a water block on the CPU VS a stock cooler can cause VRMs to get no active cooling... And this can be a problem.

Another reason the 1700 stock cooler is perfect. The airflow go to the surrounding VRM heatsink and cool down big time the power delivery components.

Real improvements need to be made to IHS materials on consumer CPUs. High end CPUs like SPARC have had diamond/copper diamond/silver composite heat spreaders for a while now with much better W/cm2 ratings, which is critically important on small nodes that tend to have hotspots.